Garcillano: Poll official with tarnished image

Virgilio Garcillano, the man accused of stealing the 2004 election for President Arroyo, has faced allegations in the past of ballot-box skullduggery.

The 68-year-old former Commission on Elections (Comelec) official is widely suspected of being one of the voices in a taped telephone conversation which allegedly shows Mrs. Arroyo conniving with him to fix the May 2004 vote.

The first part of the conversation, with a voice sounding like Mrs. Arroyo’s, saying "Hello, Garci?", has become an object of derision in the country — widely used in rap tunes and mobile phone ringtones.

But at the House of Representatives, which is investigating the alleged cheating, the three-hour tapes are serious stuff and are being used to bolster opposition calls for the President to be unseated.

"It’s like undergoing a seminar for electoral fraud," said Parañaque Rep. Roilo Golez, the President’s former national security adviser who broke away from her last week over the controversy.

Garcillano, who has withdrawn from the public eye since the scandal broke in June, was quoted in an interview with a newspaper on yesterday as saying that "many of those conversations (on the tape) are doctored."

Portrayed in the tapes as a polyglot who fielded calls in the main dialects of Cebuano, Tagalog and Ilocano, Garcillano categorically denied that he promised Mrs. Arroyo a one-million-vote victory margin and said he would confront his accusers at the proper time.

He has maintained there is nothing improper in a candidate speaking to a commissioner of the independent Comelec before the vote count is finished, adding that he spoke with other opposition and administration candidates before the votes were tallied.

Other Comelec officials and candidates have since come forward, admitting that they had conversations about the elections before the count was finished. But all of them state that they did nothing improper.

Garcillano however has a poor reputation as an election official that hurts his credibility, especially with the Congress. — AFP